Our People
Sir Tony Hoare
Fellow, Honorary Fellow
Tony Hoare obtained an MA in Lit Hum at Merton College in 1956. It remains his highest academic qualification. On National Service, he obtained a qualification as a Russian interpreter (1958). Returning to Oxford, he obtained a Certificate in Statistics (1959). The following year he spent as a British Council visiting graduate student at Moscow State University. He took up an interest in Machine Translation of Languages, and published his first learned article (in Russian) on that subject.
In 1960 he entered industrial employment as a programmer at Elliott Brothers Ltd, where he led a project to implement a compiler for ALGOL 60. After rising to the rank of Chief Scientist in the Research Division, in 1968 he was appointed as Professor of Computer Science at the Queen’s University, Belfast, where he set up its degree courses in the subject. In 1977, he moved as Professor of Computation to Oxford University, where he obtained funding and set up a number of undergraduate and graduate degrees, including the professional MSc in Software Engineering.
On reaching the academic age of retirement in 1999, he returned to industry as Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research Ltd., Cambridge. He has been working at the interface between industrial and academic research, particularly in the application of scientific method in Software Engineering, with the aid of program development tools.